Luther and Gaismair compared'

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The Reformation and Modern Political Economy:

Luther and Gaismair compared'

¹

"

In a fragment of the original notebooks for the Critique of Political Economy of 1858, known as the Grundrisse, Karl Marx referred in passing to Martin Luther as

„the oldest German political economist"¹. His remark was based upon Luther's observation in On Trade and Usury (1524): „Das kann man nicht leugnen, dass Kaufen und Verkaufen ein nötig Ding ist, das man nicht entberen und wol christ- lich brauchen k a n n . . i n other words, that production for exchange alongside production purely for consumption was a necessary feature of human life. In doing so, Marx sacrificed accuracy to apophthegm: while his verdict may possibly hold true for the German lands themselves, it ignores the decisive contribution of medieval scholastic writers, principally though not exclusively in Italy, to the development of economic thought². For the subsequent historiography of the Ger- man Reformation, however, Marx's description of Luther has had particularly un- fortunate consequences. In the first place, it has subjected Marxist economists and historians to the compulsion to construct an unbroken and dialectically ineluc- table tradition stretching from Luther's initial attack on the feudal Catholic church and his objective embodiment of the interests of an emerging bourgeoisie to modern free-market economies under capitalism. In the second, it has encouraged non-Marxists either to ignore the contribution of the German Reformation in general and Luther in particular to modern political economy, or else to reaf- firm Luther's essentially theological concern with social and economic issues which by definition precluded him from analyzing, let alone understanding, the profound transformations of his own day in their own terms.

* The text presents a revised version of the lecture delivered in Munich. For critical and help- ful comments I am grateful to Peter Blickle, Tom Brady, Erik Midelfort, and Manfred Schulze.

1 Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Berlin 1953) 891. The quotation is part of the fragments of the ori- ginal text of „Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie", which are not included in the English translation (Harmondsworth 1973).

2 Cf. the contributions of Raymond de Roover, Business, Banking and Economic Thought in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Selected Studies of Raymond de Roover. Ed. Julius Kirshner (Chicago, London 1974).

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Instead, the debate among non-Marxists over the links between Protestantism and capitalism has followed other, well-trodden paths, which led attention away from the issues of the early Reformation in the German-speaking lands to the later history of international Protestantism in the guise of Calvinism and the Puritans of England and North America. Apart from over-ingenious exegesis of Luther's concept of calling or vocation (Beruf), the pioneers of this scholarly tradition - Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch - marginalized the role of German Protestantism (by which they essentially meant Lutheranism) in the history of bourgeois liberty, or else regarded its contribution as reactionary. Yet there are, I believe, good reasons to look afresh at the German Reformers' treatment of social and economic issues: both to see whether there are connections to be made between the Reform- ers' own concerns and the policies adopted by the German princely territories before the age of classical economics, that is to say, the doctrines known as mercan- tilism or, in its German variant, cameralism; and to examine whether the Reform- ers' response to the economic dislocations of their day was purely conventional or displayed insight into the causes and trajectory of those transformations.

It is self-evident that the early Reformers, both clerical and lay, interpreted the world in the light of Scripture. The message of the Gospel - good neighbourliness, brotherly love, sharing one's goods, caring for the poor - may be seen as the theological-ethical equivalent of the medieval maxims of auskömmliche, bürgerliche, or ziemliche Nahrung, terms which do not translate precisely into English, but which see man's end in the satisfaction of immediate needs, production for consumption, and the principle of self-sufficiency, rather than in exchange, accumulation, or the search for profit3. Those Reformers who gave concrete expression to their vision of the Christian commonweal looked back, almost without exception, to a primarily agrarian world of small communities living by the sweat of their own brow, tilling the soil in communion with nature. In such a society handicrafts played a subordinate role, commerce or exchange was restricted to necessities, money was sterile, as Aristotle and the Church fathers had taught, and the profit- motive was unknown. Allied to the strong undercurrent of autarky was frequently a streak of moral rigorism, the whole informed by strains of adminis- trative rationalism characteristic of the Renaissance.

The contradictions in such a harmonizing picture need hardly be spelled out.

The lessons to be drawn from the Gospel were not clear-cut. Only a minority, the Anabaptists (and not even all of them), fully embraced the common ownership of goods, although the principle of brotherly love might seem to enjoin it. This question became acute during the Peasants' War, in which the vocal and unmistakable protests of tenants with revocable leases at the rapacity of their feudal lords must be set against the threat to their livelihood as family groups which proposals to ex- propriate farms and collectivize agriculture, voiced by certain radicals, ostensibly

3 Cf. Renate Blickte, Nahrung und Eigentum als Kategorien in der ständischen Gesellschaft, in: Winfried Schulze (ed.), Ständische Gesellschaft und Mobilität (Schriften des Historischen Kollegs, Kolloquien 12, Munich 1988) 73-93.

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posed⁴. How social relations in the Reformers' rural arcadia were to be configured - where the balance between individual property rights and collective-communal obligations was to be struck - was left unanswered.

I propose to pursue these issues by comparing the economic thought of Martin Luther and Michael Gaismair. The comparison is less outré than it might appear. It may reveal significant congruences as well as contrasts between the vision of the supreme clerical Reformer of Evangelical Protestantism and that of the exponent of a radical Christian Utopia directly influenced by the Reformed Protestant tradition of Zwingli and his followers in southern Germany.

The comparison gains piquancy, moreover, because Luther and Gaismair came from remarkably similar backgrounds, and lived and worked in landscapes under- going profound economic and social transformation in the early sixteenth century, areas stamped by the rise of large-scale mining enterprises. Both men were acutely alive to these changes (even if they viewed them with apprehension), but each sought to work out his response to the changes rather than ignore them.

My argument, therefore, attempts to go beyond both the outworn distinction between the subjective intentions and objective consequences of their thinking, once so beloved of East German Marxists, and the banal recognition that Luther and Gaismair, in common with all other Reformers, were hostile to the manifes- tations of early capitalism. Rather, I am concerned to discover how far Luther and Gaismair understood the underlying mechanisms of the market and of capital accumulation. My procedure is to begin by exploring the remarkable similarities in Luther's and Gaismair's backgrounds, before analyzing certain important strands in their thought, and finally setting their thought in a broader conceptual framework.

I .

Both men were natives of regions which were experiencing the impact of major capital investment in mining and smelting precious and base metal ores by large business enterprises who used their financial clout to monopolize both production and distribution: Luther in Saxony, which on its southern border with Bohe-

4 Cf. the essays by James Stayer and Marion Kobelt-Grocb, in: Hans-Jürgen Goertz (ed.), Alles gehört allen. Das Experiment Gütergemeinschaft vom 16. Jahrhundert bis heute (Munich 1984); James M. Stayer, The German Peasants' War and Anabaptist Community of Goods (McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Religion 6, Montreal, Kingston, Ont., London, Ont., Buffalo, N Y 1991). Whether Thomas Müntzers famous dictum, extracted under torture, omnia sunt communia, amounts to a demand for the complete abolition of pri- vate property has been questioned by Tom Scott, Thomas Müntzer. Theology and Revolu- tion in the German Reformation (Houndmills, London 1989) 170ff., and by Frank Ganseuer, Der Staat des „gemeinen Mannes". Gattungstypologie und Programmatik des politischen Schrifttums von Reformation und Bauernkrieg (Europäische Hochschulschriften, Series III 228, Frankfurt a. M., Bern, New York 1985) 84-90.

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mia had extensive reserves of silver, together with the copper and lead commonly found in argentiferous rock, as well as copper ore from the copper-shale fields of the county of Mansfeld in northern Thuringia; Gaismair in Tirol, where northern Tirol contained the richest silver mines in western Europe with their centre in Schwaz, alongside considerable deposits of salt in saliferous rock around Hall, Hallein and Reichenhall, while South Tirol, over the Brenner, held resources of silver but more particularly of lead glance (galena), used in the smelting of silver ore.

Tom Brady has spoken of Luther as the child of a „transition zone between the older, more rooted societies of western and southern Germany and the classic colonial lands of the German East", who grew up in a „relatively fluid society, a Saxony poised between its colonial past and its future plunge into the ,New Serf- dom' and absolutism", with the assumption that these circumstances coloured his thinking on politics and society⁵. But Gaismair, too, was the child of a frontier area, with Tirol as the main landborne artery of trade from Italy and the Mediter- ranean to the lands north of the Alps, its ethnically German population marching with Italian-speakers to the south, but intermingled under the jurisdiction of the Austrian Habsburgs, and the bishops of Brixen/Bressanone and Trent, and abut- ting the Venetian terraferma, where Gaismair sought refuge in exile.

Although Tirol was more obviously a commercial crossroads than Saxony, both regions had fully commercialized economies quite apart from their mining industries. By the sixteenth century Saxony was a major cultivator of the dyeplant woad, grown in the district surrounding Erfurt, which throve in symbiosis with a burgeoning textile sector, producing mostly linen, but also woollen cloth on its eastern border with Lusatia. Its rural economy was penetrated by the putting-out system, the principal manifestation of early capitalism in Germany; country crafts and manufactures flourished. And, despite their northern latitude, Saxony (along the Elbe) and Thuringia (south of Erfurt) were areas of viticulture of more than local significance: there was a lively interregional trade⁶.

Tirol's economy, not least on account of its topography, was less exposed to the putting-out system. It was a land of commerce rather than of manufactures. Yet in South Tirol on the slopes of the Adige valley viticulture was extensive, particularly for red wines on the southern marches with the Trentino, which were sent north to the major cities of Upper Germany7. But on the valley floor, as Gais-

5 Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Luther and the State: The Reformer's Teaching in Its Social Setting, in: James D. Tracy (ed.), Luther and the Modern State in Germany (Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies 7, Kirksville, MO 1986) 38.

6 Tom Scott, Economic Landscapes, in: Bob Scribner (ed.), Germany. A New Social and Economic History, vol. 1 (London, New York, Sydney, Auckland 1996) 12,15, 17; Wieland Held, Zwischen Marktplatz und Anger. Stadt-Land-Beziehungen im 16. Jahrhundert in Thüringen (Weimar 1988) III ff., 174 f.

7 Cf. Josef Nössing, Die Bedeutung der Tiroler Weine im Mittelalter, in: Christhard Schrenk, Hubert Weckbach (eds.), Weinwirtschaft im Mittelalter. Zur Verbreitung, Regionalisierung und wirtschaftlichen Nutzung einer Sonderkultur aus der Römerzeit (Quellen und For- schungen zur Geschichte der Stadt Heilbronn 9, Heilbronn 1997) 193-203.

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mair's Tirolean Constitution was to make plain, the potential existed for an inten- sified agrarian regime supplying more than purely local markets. In both Saxony and Tirol, therefore, it was not merely the presence of mining but the growth of a commercialized and diversified rural economy as a whole which made issues of capital investment, credit and interest, the organization of production, and access to markets and distribution of immediate importance.

Luther the Saxon and Gaismair the Tirolean, moreover, shared remarkably similar family histories. Luther's father Hans had been excluded as a younger son in an area of impartible inheritance from taking over the family farm. As a result, he sought his fortune in the copper mines, moving from Eisleben to Mansfeld to lease at first one, and then six, mines. Beginning as a small investor or shareholder ('Gewerke), working his own stake, Hans Luther advanced to the rank of an inde- pendent mine-owner, advising the Mansfeld counts on mining questions and, despite financial difficulties in mid-career, dying a relatively wealthy man in 1530⁸. Luther's family circle stood in close contact with mineowners who were close to the Mansfeld court⁹. His three sisters all married into mineowning families in Mansfeld, where his brother Jakob was also active, running up sizeable debts to putters-out on his mining investments¹⁰. Luther, therefore, experienced at first hand the social dislocation which the mining industry engendered, but also, of course, the potential riches which mining could bring even to the small man. It is doubtful whether Luther had any direct knowledge of the mining and smelting processes themselves, though he was certainly aware of the increasing concen- tration of ownership in a few hands, culminating, in the case of Mansfeld, in a new mining ordinance in 1536 which reserved allocation of mining shares exclusively to the counts, prompting considerable discontent amongst the existing shareholders, including Luther's brother Jakob, which was to last for several decades11. Luther himself, perhaps understandably, forsook any personal involvement (turn- ing down an offer of mining shares from the Saxon elector in 1536), not least on the grounds that they were a lottery, whose rewards had not been gained by hard work^{1 2}.

8 Günter Fabiunke, Martin Luther als Nationalökonom (Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, Schriften des Instituts für Wirtschaftsgeschichte 15, Berlin 1963) 26.

9 Dieter Stievermann, Sozial- und verfassungsgeschichtliche Voraussetzungen Martin Lu- thers und der Reformation - der landesherrliche Rat in Kursachsen, Kurmainz und Mans- feld, in: Volker Press, Dieter Stievermann (eds.), Martin Luther. Probleme seiner Zeit (Spät- mittelalter und Frühe Neuzeit. Tübinger Beiträge zur Geschichtsforschung 16, Stuttgart 1986) 169-170, 172; Ekkehard Westermann, Der wirtschaftliche Konzentrationsprozeß im Mansfelder Revier und seine Auswirkungen auf Martin Luther, seine Verwandten und Freunde, in: Rosemarie Knape (ed.), Martin Luther und der Bergbau im Mansfelder Land (Eisleben 2000) 75.

10 Hanns Freydank, Martin Luther und der Bergbau (Bilder aus der Mansfelder Vergangen- heit 4, Eisleben 1939) 40 f.

11 Westermann, Wirtschaftlicher Konzentrationsprozeß 78 f.

12 Freydank, Luther und der Bergbau, 60. In his table talk Luther disclaimed any knowledge of mining technology. D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe [WA], Tischreden [TR], 6 vols. (Weimar 1912-21) 2, 556, (No. 2629b).

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Gaismair, too, came from a moderately prosperous peasant family with hold- ings around Sterzing/Vipiteno in South Tirol at the foot of the Brenner. His father Jakob had begun to invest as a small shareholder in the mines of South Urol before the turn of the century, and he was followed by his three sons, including Mi- chael, and other Gaismair kin. These investments underwent fluctuating fortunes, and were, it seems, confined to the mining districts of South Tirol, which were less lucrative than those of North Tirol, yielding more lead glance than silver. That in itself was significant, given lead glance's indispensable role in smelting by liqu- ation, for large investors and trading companies with their clutches firmly upon the rich seams of silver around Schwaz, began to extend their reach south of the Brenner in order to control the necessary supplies of lead glance in Sterzing and elsewhere. The mining shareholders found themselves squeezed out by the large mine-owners and capitalist entrepreneurs, many of whom were not natives of Tirol¹³.

In his Territorial Constitution Gaismair reacted against this development, which he himself witnessed, with alarm, insisting that the interests of native shareholders be safeguarded. Whether Gaismair ever made much money out of his mining stakes is hard to tell; his decision to pursue a career as a territorial official, as clerk to the Austrian governor of South Tirol, was made possible by his legal training (though we do not know where he studied), rather than driven by financial necessity¹⁴.

Here, then, were two men, born into areas of social and economic transformation, from families directly exposed to those changes (for good or for ill), but who were destined for clerical - in the old sense, that is, clerkly - careers:

Luther initially as a student of law, but whose famous experience in a storm near Stotternheim drove him into the monastic life; Gaismair by choice as an official, until his temperament caused him to fall out with his employer. There is no doubt that their circumstances and their background influenced their thinking on social and economic issues - Luther indirectly, Gaismair directly, culminating in the Ter- ritorial Constitution.

No other Reformers, whether clerical or lay, could lay claim to a background which so combined regional and family experience, except possibly for Jakob Strauss. Strauss is an interesting figure in this regard, not merely because he began his reforming career in Hall in Tirol, only to be kicked out by the Austrian authorities, before settling in Saxony as preacher in Eisenach, but because he ad-

13 On Gaismair's family background and involvement in mining cf. fundamentally Angelika Bischoff-Urack, Michael Gaismair. Ein Beitrag zur Sozialgeschichte des Bauernkrieges (Ver- gleichende Gesellschaftsgeschichte und politische Ideengeschichte der Neuzeit 4, Innsbruck 1983) esp. part 2.

14 Ibid, part 3. Her hypothesis, that Gaismair studied at either Bologna or Padua, is con- temptuously dismissed by Giorgio Politi, I sette sigilli della „Landesordnung". Un pro- gramma rivoluzionario del primo Cinquecento fra equivoca e mito [part 1], in: Annali dell' Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento 12 (1986) 30f., because the surviving matriculation lists do not contain his name. But the Paduan rolls are incomplete! Exactly the same problem arises in trying to pin down Thomas Müntzer's places of study. Cf. Scott, Miintzer 3, 5.

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dressed the issue of interest-taking head-on. It should be cautioned, however, that Strauss's denunciation of interest-payments (in principle, though not in practice, no more radical than Luther's) was shaped not by any experience of speculation or profiteering in mining but by his observations of the monastic institutions and the management of their landed estates around Eisenach¹⁵.

II.

Consideration of Luther's social and economic thought has customarily focused on two components:

1. His concept of calling or vocation (Beruf), which sanctifies not only life in this world, but work itself as service to one's neighbour, while at the same time rejecting as useless the non-productive life of the monk or beggar.

2. His attitude towards mercantile and entrepreneurial activity in general, and towards interest-taking in particular, a theme which he explored at the outset of his career, first summarized in his tract On Trade and Usury of 1524, and to which he returned towards the end of his life in 1540 when he published To the Parish Clergy, to Preach against Usury.

These strands may point to the core of Luther's thought but of themselves they hardly constitute its essence. This is not the place to dwell upon Max Weber's interpretation of Luther's choice to render the passage in Ecclesiasticus XI, v.20:

„Bleibe in Gottes wort und vbe dich drinnen vnd beharre in deinem Beruff" - to prefer Beruf to Stand (estate). Luther's concept of vocation, as Tom Brady has reminded us, is part of a much older tradition stretching back at least to the twelfth century, and forms part of his general teaching on estates, which he sees not as distinct and separate groups but as sets of relationships. Inasmuch as we are all bound to one another in social relationships, it is wrong to discern in Beruf the assertion of individualism, of the autonomous personality: Beruf, too, is a social relationship¹⁶.

Luther's views on trade and interest-taking are admittedly more substantial.

The question is whether they represent anything more than the conventional wis- dom of the age, or whether they offer, however tentatively, new and independent insights into the workings of money and commerce. When Luther turns, at the end of his Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, to secular affairs - a passage of no more than a few pages - he makes it clear that his concern is to highlight the harmful social consequences of the practices which he condemns, rather than to investigate the processes which underlie those practices. Strictures

15 Justus Maurer, Prediger im Bauernkrieg (Calwer Theologische Monographien 5, Stuttgart 1979) 73 f., 437 f.; Hermann Barge, Jakob Strauss, ein Kämpfer für das Evangelium in Tirol, Thüringen und Süddeutschland (Schriften des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte 54/2 [No. 162], Leipzig 1937) 61-79, esp. 63.

16 Brady, Luther and the State 35 f.

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against monopolies, for instance, are embedded in a general critique of luxury: the large trading companies import spices, silks, velvets and articles of gold into Ger- many, all extravagances which the common man can well do without. Luther regards this conspicuous consumption as breaking the bounds of the social order;

his remarks follow directly upon his strictures on the expensiveness of clothing and transgression of the sumptuary laws¹⁷. He is not concerned to advocate a particular economic remedy, be it protectionism or autarky, a point to which I will return.

Luther's views on interest-taking, in the form of the purchase of annuities, it has often been observed, remain well behind contemporary Catholic opinion. Popes in the fifteenth century had already sanctioned the sale of annuities as compatible with canon law, and in 1515 Johann Eck, subsequently Luther's fiercest antagon- ist, had defended the taking of interest at five per cent at a public disputation in Bologna, and the following year the Fifth Lateran Council gave its approval to the monies pietatis, the low-interest-charging public pawnshops championed by the Franciscans as a means of protecting the poor against truly usurious money- lenders¹⁸. Luther agreed with the canonical prohibition on usury, conceding only that an interest-rate of between four and six per cent was permissable in certain circumstances, but that rates in excess of seven per cent were quite unjustifiable¹⁹. Behind this conventional view, however, lay startling insights into the nature of money and of accumulation, which will be examined in due course.

Yet the driving force of Luther's social and economic thought, I believe, lay elsewhere: in the responsibilities of the worldly magistrate. I am not concerned to resurrect ancient arguments over Luther and the state. Suffice it to say that Luther thought small, in terms of the household, the urban commune, and above all the patriarchal order of small territories²⁰. The state as an impersonal and oppressive juggernaut would have been inconceivable to him. For Luther, rulership, author- ity, governance were vested in persons, not institutions, to whom fit and proper persons - councillors, jurists, and not least theologians - could and should offer advice if called upon. If Luther felt himself accountable as a believer coram Deo, with equal justice one might say that he saw himself as a Christian in the world enjoined to advise and admonish coram principe.

The duties of the ruler in Luther's understanding are often presented as circum- scribed and elementary: in Tom Brady's diction, to punish sins, to restrain the wicked, and to promote God's Word²¹. This, to borrow the language of twentieth- century corporatism, is to regard the ruler's duties as subsisting entirely in the Wehramt. But there was another, more positive aspect to his responsibilities, that

1 7 Luther's Works: American Edition [LW]. Ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, Helmut T. Lehmann, 55 vols. (St Louis, Philadelphia 1955-86) 44, 212-216.

18 LW 45,234, 298.

19 Ibid. 305.

20 Theodor Strohm, Luthers Wirtschafts- und Sozialethik, in: Helmar Junghans (ed.), Leben und Werk Martin Luthers von 1526 bis 1546,2 vols. (Berlin 1983) 1,213.

21 Brady, Luther and the State 34.

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residing in the Nähramt22. Although never set down by Luther in any systematic treatment, the duties of magistrates clearly involved an active concern to promote the temporal welfare of their subjects. In what did this welfare consist, and how was it best brought about?

The Nähramt for Luther covered the entire spectrum of economic and social life, from sumptuary laws and charitable provision, to the regulation of trade, credit and interest, and to the fixing of prices for essential commodities. Essen- tially, Luther believed that the authorities had a general duty to steer the economy in a way beneficial to their subjects and themselves. Accordingly, he affirmed 1. that the population of a territory be encouraged to be wealthy, so as to ensure the livelihood of its individual subjects and to provide the territory as a whole with a fiscal resource²³; 2. that the territory, for similar reasons, should be popu- lous²⁴; 3. that the territory should live in peace, not simply as a Christian duty, but to allow its economy to flourish²⁵. In principle, these maxims could be applied to more than one economic system. In practice, however, Luther's ideological framework is that of a society which elevated agriculture above handicrafts, and handicrafts above commerce and finance. Indeed, he posits a scale of honourability, with agriculture as blessed at one end and finance as accursed at the other²⁶.

Luther sees agriculture as man's primary economic activity, because God cre- ated nature first, the natural resources for man to exploit. Moreover, agriculture demands great physical effort; it engages the whole body and by so doing helps protect against the egotistic pursuit of profit²⁷. In his own territory, Saxony, Luther was quite explicit: when he praised agriculture he meant tillage, the cultivation of grain, for bread is the staff of life. He argued consequently that the extensive cultivation of woad around Erfurt as an industrial crop should be discour- aged precisely because it exhausted the soil and conduced to the acquisition of money - it made the peasant hungry for thalers, as he put it - , rather than satis- fying immediate subsistence²⁸.

All this might seem to confirm the image of a simple rural arcadia, were we not aware of the positive responsibilities implied in the Nähramt. Yet on closer in-

2 2 These are the terms used by Fabiunke, Luther als Nationalökonom 87 ff., but their impli- cations are accepted by non-Marxist scholars, too. Cf. Ernst Eduard Albert Hahn, Die Be- deutung des Luthertums für die Entwicklung der Grundlagen der kameralistischen Wirt- schaftslehre (Diss, jur.-pol. Göttingen 1942) 103-105. Luther's view of the prince's duty of care for his subjects was developed more fully by Melanchthon, who regarded happiness, following Aristotle, as the aim of human society. Cf. Georg-Christoph von Unruh, Polizei, Polizeiwissenschaft und Kameralistik, in: Kurt G. A. Jeserich, Hans Pohl, Georg-Christoph von Unruh (eds.), Deutsche Verwaltungsgeschichte, vol. 1 (Stuttgart 1983) 398.

2 3 Sermons Expounding Matthew 18-24 (1537-40), Ch. 19. D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kriti- sche Gesamtausgabe [WA], 67 vols. (Weimar 1883-1997) 47, 356.

2 4 Exposition of Psalm 147 (1532). WA 31/1,437.

» Ibid. 439.

2 6 Cf. Strohm, Luthers Wirtschafts- und Sozialethik 210 f.

2 7 TR 3, 45, No. 2871b; cf. LW 44,216; Fabiunke, Luther als Nationalökonom 102f.

2 8 Ibid. 103; TR 3, 45, (No. 2871b); cf. TR 4,177, (No. 4170); ibid. 305, (No. 4420).

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spection two aspects of Luther's view of nature and of the sanctity of manual labour point in quite unexpected directions.

In the first place, as the most natural and hence most godly labour Luther praises not simply agriculture but also mining. Although understandable in the light of his father's career, mining with its capital investment, division of labour, technological advances and break-down of production into separate and special- ized stages might appear to fly in the face of Luther's critique of commercialized rural activity. But in his Exposition of the 127th Psalm to the Christians at Riga in Livonia (1524) Luther asks rhetorically: „Who puts silver and gold in the moun- tains so that man might find them there... Does the labor of man do this? To be sure, labor no doubt finds it, but God has first to bestow it.. ,"²⁹ They are as much a blessing of nature, of God's endowment, as the fruit of the field. Since he knew what mining involved, was Luther here tacitly and complicity sanctioning capital accumulation, specialization of production, and bullionism? After all, as Volker Press once observed, for all his polemic against south German capitalists and monopolists such as the Fuggers, Luther never offered any criticism of the Saxon mining entrepreneurs of his day, many of whom were known to him³⁰.

The answer seems to be that Luther, who recognized the reality of the risks undergone by those who engaged in trade and industry, regarded mining as the risk venture par excellence. Riches, he said, are not in themselves contemptible, if they are the result of honest toil, rather than the riskless and indolent accumulation of money as interest. Whether labour in mining leads to wealth lies in God's hand. As he commented in his Exposition of the 6th Chapter of St Matthew's Gos- pel (1532) at verse 34 ("Take therefore no thought for the morrow; for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself"): „Sihe wie es gehet auff den Bergk- werken, da man ia vleissig grebt und suchet, noch kompts offt also, das wo man am meisten ertz hoffet und sich beweiset, als wolts eitel gold werden, da findet sich nichts odder schneit sich bald abe und verschwindet unter den henden."³¹ As Hermann Barge correctly remarked, this amounts almost to a wheel of fortune; it is not so much honest toil as mere chance which makes the yield from mining unobjectionable: „Summa es sol heissen nicht gesucht sondern beschert, nicht ge- funden sondern zugefallen, wenn glueck und segen dabey sein sol."32

In the second place, although Luther emphasized that the primary purpose of the production of goods was consumption, and that their exchange-value was sec- ondary, none the less he realized that in society as it was constituted buying and selling were inevitable, and that commerce to supply essential commodities was legitimate. From the perspective of the Nähramt it was incumbent upon the magistrate to ensure that commercial exchange did not lead to distortions of price

29 LW 45, 327; Strohm, Luthers Wirtschafts- und Sozialethik 210.

30 Volker Press, Martin Luther und die sozialen Kräfte seiner Zeit, in: idem, Ausgewählte Aufsätze. Ed. Johannes Kunisch (Historische Forschungen 59, Berlin 1997) 600.

31 WA 32, 471.

32 Ibid. Hermann Barge, Luther und der Frühkapitalismus (Schriften des Vereins für Refor- mationsgeschichte 58/1 [No. 168], Gütersloh 1951) 32.

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and supply; to that end Luther suggested that the price of goods be fixed by tariff and that the number of merchants should be limited33.

By conceding this point, Luther was obliged to recognize the necessity and indeed the utility of the division of labour by which goods destined for exchange, that is, commodities, were produced. Moreover, he was bound to acknowledge that the price of those commodities was not determined in the first instance by any intrinsic or fixed value in the money used to exchange them - the bullionist assumption - but by the labour required to produce them34. In effect, labour itself becomes a commodity. Luther, of course, never thought that far. A reified concept of labour based on objective criteria - labour-input, labour-time - fundamental to classical economics would have been repugnant to a man who saw work as service to one's neighbour³⁵.

Nevertheless, the existence of a commercial economy based on the division of labour and the exchange of commodities encouraged Luther to reflect on the nature of money. In his arguments on interest-payments he examines the circumstances which might justify the taking of interest; clearly they had to involve an element of risk. Loans without risk were usury pure and simple. That is why he distinguished sharply between capital invested in a business, which by definition involved risk, and the buying of annuities with a guaranteed income, which involved no risk at all, and hence was objectionable³⁶. Nevertheless, in On Trade and Usury and again in To the Parish Clergy, to Preach against Usury Luther ad- vances the principle of interest-payments as compensation for arrears or default on the money lent, what he calls Schadewacht. The risk involved was both that of a real or actual loss and a loss arising through foregone profit (that is, money which might otherwise have been profitably invested elsewhere for the duration of the loan). This distinction between loss as titulus damni emergenti and loss as titulus lucri cessantis shows Luther fully aware that money possessed an intrinsic capacity to accumulate - that it could provide both consumption credit and productive credit -, in other words that money possessed the property of capital37.

This is a view which a minority of scholastic thinkers, as Raymond de Roover has shown, had already advanced. Against the majority, who clung to the Aris- totelian belief that money was sterile, some fourteenth-century moralists, such as Gregory of Rimini, Peter of Ancarano, and Lorenzo Ridolfi, had cautiously con-

3 3 LW 45,249; Fabiunke, Luther als Nationalökonom 113 ff.

3 4 Ibid. 99. Cf. Hermann Lehmann, Luthers Platz in der Geschichte der politischen Ökono- mie, in: Günter Vogler (ed.), Martin Luther. Leben - Werk - Wirkung (Berlin 1983) 283.

35 Strohm, Luthers Wirtschafts- und Sozialethik 210.

3 6 LW 45, 300.

3 7 WA 51,344f; Fabiunke, Luther als Nationalökonom 130-131; Hans-Jürgen Prien, Luthers Wirtschaftsethik (Göttingen 1992) 137f. Prien questions Fabiunkes's view that Luther thereby recognized the inherent capacity of money to accumulate, for he speaks in the con- text of a largely agrarian economy, where only grains had any natural capacity to reproduce themselves severalfold. But this ignores Luther's view on mining and on his contacts with the Mansfeld mineworkers (to which Prien devotes culpably little attention).

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ceded that compensation was allowable on loans made from necessity or charity38. But a century earlier, the French Spiritual Franciscan, Peter Olivi, had extended the remit of lucrum cessans to cover any loan where a,probable profit', calculated as an average rate of return over time, had been foregone39. Money as something seminal rather than sterile, which as capital invested in a business venture would produce a legitimate profit, was a concept with which the scholastics struggled - San Bernardino contradicted himself on the issue - , but they had certainly pio- neered a new understanding of money and interest well before Luther40.

Nevertheless, there is no indication whatever that Luther arrived at his views through a reading of the scholastics, of whose theology in any case he was mostly so contemptuous. He appears to have come to his understanding independently; it cannot be ruled out that his knowledge of the mining industry led him to these insights. Despite the need to tread warily, some historians and economists, particularly certain Marxists, have not shrunk from reaching highly incautious con- clusions about the originality of Luther's thought. Yet Marx himself argued only that Luther recognized both the necessity of commerce and the nature of goods as commodities, as well as the different properties inhering in money as a means of purchase and as an instrument of accumulation. He did not argue that Luther was the direct pioneer of the labour theory of value, an accolade which he reserved for the true founder of political economy in his eyes, the English seventeenth-century statistician and agrarian reformer, Sir William Petty41.

III.

Michael Gaismair's Territorial Constitution for Tirol has received as contradictory and inconsistent interpretations as Luther's writings on social and economic issues42. It is frequently seen as a Utopian blueprint, estranged from reality, pro-

38 Raymond de Roover, San Bernardino of Siena and Sant'Antonio of Florence: The Two Great Economic Thinkers of the Middle Ages (Boston 1967) 31.

39 Julius Kirsbner, Raymond de Roover on Scholastic Economic Thought, in: de Roover, Business, Banking and Economic Thought 30.

40 Idem, Scholastic Economics. Survival and Lasting Influence from the Sixteenth Century to Adam Smith, in: ibid. 310.

41 Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, vol. 1 (London 1967) 1.

42 The main interpretations are reviewed in Politi, I sette sigilli, part 1,12-38. To these should be added Ganseuer, Staat des „gemeinen Mannes" 187-235. Text (in English translation) in:

Tom Scott, Bob Scribner (eds.), The German Peasants' War: A History in Documents (Atlan- tic Highlands, NJ, London 1991) 265-269; German texts (with exhaustive philological and diplomatic analysis) in Giorgio Politi, I sette sigilli della „Landesordnung". 2. Per una resti- tuzione del testo, in: Annali dell' Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento 14 (1988) 87-232:

Vienna text 208-215; Brixen/Bressanone text 223-231. Politi has meanwhile incorporated these findings into a book, which contains an added section devoted to Gaismair's career be- fore and after his exile. Giorgio Politi, Gli statuti impossibili. La rivoluzione tirolese del 1525 e il „programma" di Michael Gaismair (Turin 1995). It also corrects some slips in his previous

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jecting social and economic relations back in time to an age of innocence, ignorant of or hostile towards trade, enterprise and capital accumulation. In so far as commercial activity was to be tolerated, the Constitution provided that it should be under state control, in public ownership, and directed to the common good. These provisions were extended in particular to the Tirolean mining industry.

Gaismair's is not the only social and economic programme to have emerged in the early years of the Reformation. Given its genesis within the unfolding Peas- ants' War it most properly bears comparison with Friedrich Weygandt's draft of an imperial reform programme intended to be submitted to the Heilbronn .peasants' parliament* of May 1525, which in turn was based upon the so-called Teut- scher Nation Notturft of 1523. These were only the latest in a long line of imperial reform proposals stretching back to the early fifteenth century. In its concern for the establishment of a sound coinage, uniform weights and measures, and restrictions upon the activities of the large monopolistic trading houses Gaismair's Con- stitution echoes for Tirol what Weygandt and others proposed for the Empire as a whole^{4 3}. Their concerns were indeed the subject of repeated debate at imperial diets in the first half of the sixteenth century.

Within Tirol itself, many of the clauses of the Constitution take up and system- atize long-standing grievances, such as those expressed in the Meran/Merano Ar- ticles submitted to the territorial diet in May 1525, in which Gaismair's hand has often been descried⁴⁴. If the Constitution were no more than a redaction of earlier grievances, however, it would scarcely merit particular analysis here. Its continu- ing fascination lies in the fact that its detailed provisions are embedded in a wider view of the social order - in an ideological framework derived from reforming precepts, with which Gaismair became acquainted through his contacts with Zwingli in Zürich in the winter of 1525/26.

This is not the place to discuss the formidable source problems surrounding the Tirolean Constitution in any detail. All those who have analyzed the Territorial Constitution (the term Landesordnung is a gloss by a later hand) agree that it contains internal inconsistencies, repetitions, and linguistic oddities, so that it cannot represent a finished document. Most recently, however, in an exhaustive examin- ation, Giorgio Politi has shown beyond peradventure that the Territorial Consti- tution - against the views of its previous modern editors, Albert Hollaender and Jürgen Bücking - cannot be either an autograph or even a fair copy of Gaismair's text. Rather

rappresenta insomma la Landesordnung non come la pensò il suo autore ma come reiusciron a ricostruirla (o come vollero anche ricostruirla) i suoi nemici, in base fosse a qualche fram- mento scritto, ma soppratutto, con ogni probabilità, ai rapporti delle spie e alle confessioni dei congiurati⁴⁵.

edition of the texts. Cf. the review by Aldo Stella in: Rivista di storia della Chiesa in Italia 49 (1995) 533-538.

43 Scott, Scribner, German Peasants' War 259-264.

4 4 Ibid. 86-91.

45 Politi, I sette sigilli, part 1, 59.

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This textual farrago Politi contrasts unfavourably with the clear focus of earlier articles of grievance emanating from the South Tirolean rebels. Be that as it may, any attempt to detect a continuity or development between them is fraught with difficulty. Jürgen Bücking's suggestion that Gaismair's programme should be styled as his Second Territorial Constitution, elaborating ideas first adumbrated in the Neustift/Novacella Articles of 14 May 1525 or, in an abbreviated form, in the Articles of the Town of Brixen/Bressanone a week later, has encountered a very mixed response from scholars, though much of the debate concerns Bücking's un- fortunate nomenclature, rather than the content of these sets of articles. In my view, although they undoubtedly contain elements which prefigure the Territorial Constitution, neither set of articles should be ascribed in any direct sense to Gais- mair⁴⁶. Even the Meran/Merano Articles, with a better claim to Gaismair's involvement, find far fewer echoes in the Constitution than is commonly supposed.

Of the eleven (from a total of 62) Meran Articles which deal with economic and commercial matters, only four (though they include the mines) have correspond- ing provisions in the Territorial Constitution, though some other oblique connections can be made47.

The economic clauses of the Constitution may conveniently be considered under three headings: agriculture, artisan production, and mining.

1. Gaismair puts forward an ambitious, but in principle entirely feasible, plan to increase the agricultural output of the territory, which is intended to have the ad- ditional benefit of improving the population's health. Draining the marshes down the Etsch/Adige valley would not only bring more land into cultivation, chiefly as pasture, but remove the .noxious vapours' emanating from them, that is, the danger of malaria. Although Gaismair is keen to promote the staples of meat and grain, he is just as concerned to encourage the planting of olive-trees and the improvement of viticulture48. Indeed, he expressly advocates a diversified agricultural regime modelled on the Italian commercialized system of cultura promiscua.

This work of improvement - reminiscent of some eighteenth-century agro- nomists - is to be carried out in each district by the entire community, organized in labour brigades, under communal supervision, every year at the appropriate time. This provision, with its overtones of the Chinese cultural revolution, should not be taken as the forerunner to the expropriation of tenant farms or the collec- tivization of agriculture. Gaismair says nothing directly about peasant proprietary

46 Bischoff-Urack, Gaismair 109f. The Neustift Articles make no reference to mining, but they do mention the Fuggers as a trading company, while the Brixen Town Articles refer to the (monopolistic) merchant companies. Ibid. 117. Backing's suggestion of a direct link be- tween the Neustift articles and the Territorial Constitution is vigorously dismissed by Politi, Gli statuti impossibili 279-286, but regarded as plausible by Aldo Stella, Ii „Bauernführer"

Michael Gaismair e l'utopia di un repubblicanesimo popolare (Annali dell'Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento, Monografie 33, Bologna 1999) 99-104.

4 7 Meran Articles §§ 18,21, 22, 32. Scott, Scribner, German Peasants' War 90f.

4 8 Cf. Jürgen Bucking, Michael Gaismair: Reformer - Sozialrebell - Revolutionär. Seine Rolle im Tiroler „Bauernkrieg" (1525/32) (Spätmittelalter und Frühe Neuzeit. Tübinger Bei- träge zur Geschichtsforschung 5, Stuttgart 1978) 158 nn. 66, 67, 69.

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rights, but we are justified in inferring that individual/family ownership of land within the framework of communal jurisdictions would continue. The provision that there should be no commerce in land can perhaps be seen as reinforcing this, inasmuch as it seems intended to prevent the accumulation of large landholdings by graziers and the spread of commercial leases49.

2. Elements of state supervision and nationalization, by contrast, are readily vis- ible in the clauses dealing with crafts, manufacturing and distribution. Gaismair envisages two markets for his territory, centrally located in the Etsch/Adige valley for South Tirol and in the Inn valley for North Tirol. There all manufactured goods are to be sold, with the hawking of goods by itinerant pedlars (a standard grievance of the day) banned. In the same spirit Gaismair proposes Trent as the territory's central - and sole - manufactory, where all artisan and industrial production shall take place under a publicly appointed superintendent on a state sal- ary50. Consequent upon this centralization, all internal tolls are to be abolished;

only at the frontier of the territory are tolls to be levied on exports, while imports go toll-free51.

To see in these plans a recipe for autarky and a subsistence economy is to go too far, however. Gaismair recognizes that one central manufactory and two regional markets may be insufficient to ensure the efficient distribution of goods in an economy where commodity exchange is fundamental, since he allows for addi- tional shops to be set up if necessary52. Diversified agriculture, particularly graz- ing and viticulture, is not part of a subsistence regime. And the manufactures to be located in Trent include items - silks, hats, brassware, velvets, shoes - some of which must be regarded as luxuries. Moreover, while Gaismair is keen to restrict exports across the Confinen of Tirol, here understood expressly as the southern frontier into Italy, he envisages importing what the land itself cannot provide, in the first instance spices53. In these respects Gaismair goes well beyond Luther.

An anti-commercial stance has sometimes been deduced from remarks earlier in the Constitution about towns, which in his view should be abolished. This reading is not sustainable. The passage in question addresses the issue of fortified places in general - castles as well as circumvallated towns. These strongholds are to be eliminated in order to ensure social equality in the territory or, to put it another way, to make certain that such fortified places cannot defy the common will by insisting upon their liberties, their immunities, in hiding behind high walls. The provision has nothing whatever to do with economic activity in the towns - the dubious practices of merchants, the enforcement of staples, price-rigging, and the privileges of the craft guilds. This impression has arisen because the Meran Ar- ticles do identify such abuses, and it is assumed that they must have been carried over into the Territorial Constitution (which says next to nothing on such

4 9 Territorial Constitution § 19. Scott, Scribner, German Peasants' War 267.

50 §§ 19,22. Ibid. 268.

51 § 15. Ibid. 266.

52 § 19. Ibid. 268.

53 § 19. Ibid. 268.

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matters)⁵⁴. Rather, Gaismair's purpose is explicitly egalitarian: to create a Chris- tian Commonwealth in which there shall be no distinction between men.

In so far as a particular economic stance can be inferred from Gaismair's comments on the circulation of goods and money, then he is a declared monetarist or bullionist. Over and over again he is concerned to preserve coin or bullion in the land, to establish a sound domestic coinage, and to reject foreign specie unless it is of equivalent weight and fineness. Adequate reserves of bullion are necessary, moreover, in case of military emergency⁵⁵.

3. This bullionist stance was clearly informed by Gaismair's own experience of mining in Tirol, and it is the concluding section on mining in the Tirolean Consti- tution which has attracted the greatest attention. In it, Gaismair's hostility towards the foreign mining companies, especially the South German merchant houses of the Fugger, Höchstetter, Baumgartner and Bimmel, is manifest. He accuses them of usury (which we may translate here as making excessive profits), of paying their workers in truck, and of driving up the price of basic commodities by forestalling. Consequently, Gaismair calls for the nationalization of all mines and smelteries owned by the nobility and foreign merchants. Smelting, indeed, is to be run as a state collective enterprise under an inspector-general, with the price of ore determined by a state tariff, not by market forces⁵⁶.

The detail and emotion with which Gaismair comments on the Tirolean mining industry certainly reflect his own knowledge and experience, but do so from a quite particular angle, that of his own family's business history. For one thing, his call for the expropriation of noble mine-owners does not seem to have much con- nection with the activity of the foreign monopolistic merchant houses. It is only intelligible against the background of attempts by Gaismair's father, Hans, to ob- tain a lease on the smeltery in Sterzing from Emperor Maximilian in 1507. When the monarch refused, the Gaismairs switched their attention to Persen/Pergine by Trent. Here they established a haulage company and business firm with investments in the local mines, but were thwarted in their ambitions by the local aristo- cratic family of Trautmannsdorf, which ran up considerable debts with the Gaismairs which were never discharged. Persen was abandoned after 1516 in fa- vour of investment in Ladurnsbach by Sterzing⁵⁷.

For another, Gaismair's remarks on the predicament of the lesser mining shareholders who were not themselves smelting-masters not only reflected his own family's situation as small investors in general but the particular circumstances of the industry round Sterzing. After 1500 mine- and smeltery-owners from Schwaz

54 § 5. Ibid. 266. Cf. Meran Articles, §§ 20, 27, 28, 47. Ibid. 90, 91, 93. Cf. Siegfried Hoyer, Die Tiroler Landesordnung des Michael Gaismair. Uberlieferung und zeitgenössische Ein- flüsse, in: Fridolin Dörrer (ed.), Die Bauernkriege und Michael Gaismair. Protokoll des inter- nationalen Symposions vom 15. bis 19. November in Innsbruck-Vill (Veröffentlichungen des Tiroler Landesarchivs 2, Innsbruck 1982) 72.

55 Territorial Constitution §§ 20, 22. Scott, Scribner, German Peasants' War 268.

Ibid. 268 f.

57 Bischoff-Urack, Gaismair 47-51.

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began to encroach upon the Sterzing industry to the point where it threatened to decline to the status of a dependent supplier under the control of a vertically inte- grated monopoly-capital business, in which Schwaz entrepreneurs co-ordinated extraction, smelting, transport, as well as the marketing of the refined silver⁵⁸.

Gaismair's response was to nationalize the mines, but that policy was not altogether what it seemed, and certainly did not imply the socialization of the mining industry as a whole59. His plans ignored the substantial mining investments of native Tirolean entrepreneurs, such as the Stockl, Fieger, and Tanzl in Sterzing itself, whose businesses remained untouched by his proposals⁶⁰. Gaismair's plans also envisaged the continuation of wage-labour in the mines and the existence of small-scale mining shareholders⁶¹.

Gaismair sees the future prosperity of Tirol as depending directly upon the yield of its silver-, lead-, and copper-mines. He even hopes that mining revenue will be sufficient to cover all ordinary public expenditure, so that no taxes need be levied. He is particularly anxious, therefore, to promote further mining explora- tion - and nowhere does he suggest that prospecting be restricted to state enterprises. The entire thrust of the mining chapter of the Tirolean Constitution is to safeguard the position of the labour-employing petty-capitalist mining shareholders against the threat of subordination to the oligopolists of the South Ger- man cities.

It is necessary to add that this interpretation is fundamentally at odds with that of Politi, who dismisses any concern by Gaismair to protect the interests of his social class, and who regards the mining article by virtue of its diction and language as largely inauthentic. But his approach is grounded exclusively in a highly rigor- ous textual analysis, which is not only indifferent to the wider ideological-ma- terial context of Gaismair's vision, but which rejects out-of-hand the one attempt - by Angelika Bischoff-Urack - to test Gaismair's proposals against the real-his- torical background of his and his family's career⁶².

58 Ibid. 33.

5 9 Politi is scathing about this proposal, blindly swallowed by all previous scholars. How could the mines be .nationalized' when, as regalian rights, they already belonged to the prince (archduke Ferdinand of Austria), who had merely leased them to mining entrepre- neurs? Politi, I sette sigilli, part 2,93 f.; idem, Gli statuti impossibili 98 f. His objection is fat- uous: the mines were to be taken out of feudal ownership and entrusted to the common- wealth.

60 Bischoff-Urack, Gaismair 29.

61 Karl-Heinz Ludwig, Zur Interpretation „Des Pergwerchs" in der „Landesordnung" des Michael Gaismair von Anfang 1526, in: Technikgeschichte 44 (1977) 45; idem, Sozialemanzi- patorische, politische und religiose Bewegungen 1524—1526 im Montanwesen des Ostalpen- raums, in: Dorrer, Die Bauernkriege 213 f. Bischoff-Urack points out that Gaismair had al- ready been the co-signatory of gravamina sent in 1512 (or earlier) to emperor Maximilian on behalf of the „common association in Falkenstein and Weifienschrofen", which voiced the concerns of small shareholders (Gewerken), contract labourers (Lehenhduer), and wage-la- bourers at the practices of the large mining shareholders and the mining judge (as the prince's agent). Bischoff-Urack, Gaismair 68f.

6 2 In a complete caricature he accuses Bischoff-Urack of portraying Gaismair as a 16th-cen-

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IV.

An initial comparison of Luther and Gaismair reveals more congruences than one might suspect.

1. Although both men are opposed to the large-scale enterprises and monopolies of their day, neither draws the conclusion that commerce as such can or should be prohibited.

2. Their shared concern to prevent usury places severe restrictions on the development of credit and investment, but does not rule out a concern for sound money or the recognition of money's necessary role as a medium of exchange.

3. Their admiration for an agrarian society cannot be equated with simple subsistence husbandry, since both men stress the importance of natural resources, which include precious metals, whose extraction and processing required investment and technology beyond anything conceivable within a subsistence economy.

4. The rights of private property are respected by both men. Luther justifies the private ownership of the means of production by pointing to the necessity of the Christian possessing the wherewithal to help his neighbour. Just as human labour, so too property serves a social function and should be used ethically not egotisti- cally. Gaismair seeks to balance the interests of equality and the Christian commonweal, which in his vision require state ownership and control of some branches of the economy, against peasant proprietorship of the family farms and the stake of shareholders in the mines, where dependent wage-labour will continue to be employed.

5. It is the function of the Obrigkeit, whether it be the prince, the civic magistrate, or the communally controlled territory, to promote the welfare of the population by active means. That includes wealth-creation, both individually and col- lectively within an economic system which allows and encourages the economic initiative of the individual, but whose inherent dangers make extensive regulation and control necessary63.

That is not to elide or obscure the differences between Luther and Gaismair, some of which were obviously predicated upon their personal situation and pro- fession. Luther, the conservative (and the eschatologist), was suspicious of all those who believed that the world could be made fully conformable to God's will

tury yuppie, and ignores her attempts (which continue the researches of Karl-Heinz Ludwig) to reconstruct Gaismair's career. Politi, I sette sigilli, part 1,29. This contempt has been toned down in Politi, Gli statuti impossibili 26, where her depiction of Gaismair becomes merely

„una sorta d'arrivista". Politi's criticism of Bischoff-Urack's textual expertise should be set against Stella's review of Politi's own shortcomings in: Rivista di storia della Chiesa in Italia 49 (1959) 533-538.

63 For Luther cf. WA 31/1,439: ,,es ligt der Oberckeit viel dran, das sie reiche unterthan hab, und sie selbst auch reich sei. Den ohn gelt und guth kann widder das weltlich regiment noch einige Haushaltung bestehen." The positive function of the Obrigkeit is also recognized by Prien, Luthers Wirtschaftsethik 161 f., who speaks not of a Ndhramt but of a Ndchstenamt.

Ibid. 158, 229 f.

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(he had, after all, first-hand experience of Thomas Müntzer). Gaismair, the radical and activist, was inspired by his contacts with the Zürich Reformation to put forward the vision of a new Christian republic in South Tirol. His Territorial Consti- tution betrays obvious affinities with Zwingli's Radtschlag as a plan of campaign in defence of the Word of God, including the establishment of an independent government (or republic) in the Etsch valley, which Politi has plausibly suggested was intended to comprehend the secular territories of the bishops of Brixen and Trent, the core of .Gaismair's land', as it is described in the Territorial Constitu- tion64. Whether the Tirolean Constitution as a whole flew in the face of reality need not concern us here, except to caution that the negative judgement passed specifically on its economic provisions by Jürgen Bücking is altogether too facile65.

V.

Among the Reformers of the sixteenth century Luther and Gaismair stand out as thinkers who identified the economic problems of their day and sought to offer solutions which they believed were consonant with the teachings of the Gospels.

It is significant, therefore, that neither man chose to embrace simple self-sufficiency (let alone apostolic poverty), or to reject private property. Despite their commitment to a Christian commonweal, neither was the advocate of a classless society.

Yet how their economic thinking should be characterized, and how it should be categorized within the evolution of political economy are questions which remain highly controversial. Within the Marxist tradition, the necessity to demonstrate that Karl Marx never erred has proved particularly fateful. In the German Demo- cratic Republic, the thesis of the early bourgeois revolution, propounded in the early 1960s, posited a direct ideological lineage from Luther to Adam Smith (described, alas, by Engels as ,the economic Luther'), and essentially bracketed the evolution of political economy in the intervening centuries. Not only did this or- thodoxy ignore Marx's own reflections in the Grundrisse on mercantilists, cameralists, and physiocrats, it also consigned to obscurity the one East German work which does build upon Marx's insights and which does discuss (in passing) mer-

64 Politi, I sette sigilli, part 1, 64f., 74, 79ff., 85. Politi merely follows the modern consensus that the Radtschlag should be dated to early 1526, rather than late 1524/early 1525, as its edi- tors had supposed. Cf. Otto P. Clavedetscher, Die Bauernunruhen im Gebiet der heutigen Eidgenossenschaft. Mit einem Exkurs über die Beziehungen Gaismairs zur Schweiz, in: Dör- rer, Die Bauernkriege 153-160, here at 158. Text of the Radtschlag in: Huldreich Zwingiis Sämtliche Werke, vol. 3. Ed. Emil Egli, Georg Finsler, Walther Köhler (Corpus Reformato- r e n 90, Leipzig 1914) 551-583; plans for Tirol, 563. Stella, II „Bauernführer" 133-139 con- curs with the modern dating, but does not discuss whether the plan was primarily directed at the ecclesiastical principalities.

65 Biicking, Gaismair 89 f.

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cantilists and cameralists as the pioneers of modern political economy, namely Giinter Fabiunke's Martin Luther als Nationaldkonom (1963). Not that Fabiunke himself can be absolved from passing apodictic judgements - for instance, that Luther's thought is an amalgam of feudal, peasant-proprietorial, and petty-bourgeois elements⁶⁶. It is not that such judgements are necessarily wrong; rather, they create a false impression. Luther, it seems, is consigned to an intellectual playpen, in which he naively seeks to reconcile the irreconcilable, so that his thought re- mains syncretic, macaronic, or simply incoherent. In recent times - though not by Marxist historians - similar charges have been laid against Gaismair, whose Tiro- lean Constitution is supposed to contain both petty-capitalist and socialist elements in uneasy juxtaposition. Jiirgen Bucking has arraigned the Tirolean Con- stitution as a whole on the grounds of primitivism, xenophobia, ethnocentrism, moral rigorism, anticapitalism, rational-bureaucratic planning, and a belief in the cyclical nature of social processes - in short, he denounces Gaismair s ideal Tirol as a Hegungsstaat, a term coined as recently as 1967 by R. F. Behrendt, and which could somewhat loosely be translated into English as the nanny state⁶⁷. It is diffi- cult to suppress the feeling that such verdicts tell us more about their authors - and their authors' agendas - than they do about Luther or Gaismair. That is not to deny the contradictory or incompatible elements in both men's thought. Rather, it is to suggest that their fractured thinking may mirror a fractured reality, con- fronted as they were with a society - in Saxony and the Urol, at least - which displayed all the symptoms of die Gleicbzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen.

VI.

The sixteenth century in Germany was the first great age of Polizey (good police), when the authorities began to intervene in social and economic affairs for more than merely fiscal or defensive purposes. The aspect of Polizey which has received most attention is that which is now called social disciplining, but intervention in or regulation of economic and commercial life was of equal importance. The mo- tives were both positive and negative: to augment princely revenues in the face of mounting civil and military expenditure, but also to inhibit practices which were held inimical to the commonweal. It used to be thought that Polizey was chiefly the preoccupation of the territorial princes, but since the researches of Fritz Blaich it has become clear that the imperial diet returned continually throughout the sixteenth century to economic and commercial questions: the harmful consequences of monopolistic enterprises, the need to stem the loss of bullion from Germany and to promote domestic industries (such as the manufacture of woollen cloth), as well as the regulation of coinage (at last crowned with success in 1559 in the im-

66 Fabiunke, Luther als Nationalökonom 144.

67 Bucking, Gaismair 90.